Liar's Game
by EYES to LIE
Summary: Lying was a delicate practice after all. He would and should lie to her, and for her. But the thing is, Banjou Kizaki could never lie to Bekku Nanaki. And she knew it all along. Ann Cassandra tribute. Banjou-centric, rape.


**One of my personal favorites, Ann Cassandra. The little-known-ness of it makes me rather sad.**

**Disclaimer: I wish it was mine, but it isn't so.  


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**Lying was a delicate practice after all.

While he sat, slumped over at his full desk next to the empty one, Banjou Kizaki began to wonder just when he had started lying so much. Taking off his glasses--the hot pink frames even hurt _his _eyes every now and then--he watched as the room went blurry and the colors began to leak. Strangely enough, it simultaneously brought everything into focus so sharply and harshly that he closed his eyes, pinching the skin between his eyebrows in pained frustration. He knew where and when it had started, of course. If Banjou started forgetting things he wouldn't have been such a great "Prediction Breaker".

Damn it all.

Bekku-san.

Those two thoughts collided in his overworked mind as he sat in the darkened classroom, and despite the open window continually blowing in a refreshing nighttime breeze, he found himself thinking--and not for the first time--that he needed some damn air. But--also not for the first time--he couldn't find the energy to give towards the effort of moving. And so he sits. And thinks. And wonders.

Really, they had all just been these small, little white lies before he met Bekku Nanaki, the "Mirror Clairvoyant" who wanted nothing to do with her gift. And they were lies about his injuries, or his reasons for looking for this or that or where he was five minutes ago--even five hours ago! Simple things no one really cared about anyways, since he was the unlucky senpai and no person with any way or form of sanity would want to be around for more than a minute or two. But of course, there was Bekku-san. The first prediction he had actually managed to break. It made sense then, that she would be the last prediction he couldn't break. But he still felt like the world had cheated him.

Didn't it though?

She seemed to bring as much luck as he did misfortune--they balanced well; the old convoluted concept of Yin and Yang that suddenly didn't seem quite so off-chart after all. But her friends had warned her on her very first day--on her very first school gossip session!--that she should stay away from him. That she would be mixed up and eaten by his misfortune. But she hadn't believed and he hadn't cared, and they became "Banjo and Becky". A vague remnant of a grin tweaked his lips as he remembered her almost instantaneous rejection when he'd 'jokingly' propositioned her.

Banjou opened his eyes.

It was the lie that got him.

_[I have broken all the predictions. _

_In spring of my 20th year, _

_my death under a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. _

_That's the only prediction I have left.]_

He supposed the only way he'd managed to lie to her face like that was that he hadn't done it. Hadn't looked her in the eyes as she stared back at him with shocked ones. The photo in his pocket--the one he had taken from the book ages ago, before Makita had burned it--probably helped too. It was his resolve, really. How could he be able to look the girl he felt a tentative love for in the face and tell her of her future calamity? How could he be able to tell her that everything was alright and that they would be able to break this prediction too?

The answer was simple.

He couldn't.

Bekku-san.

The photo wasn't a crime scene photo with one or more dead corpses, as it usually was. It was more like a still out of a movie he had missed, because she was perfectly alive in it. It didn't show her face though--they never did--and he hadn't realized that it was her until the bomb scare on their 'date', when she had shown him the mirror from the little girl months before. The second prediction, where he had found out about

_[Mirrors show me future calamities.]_

her power_. _That cute little kid who hadn't known it was actually her fate to live and her fate to grant Bekku her fate. "Jesus..." he mutters quietly while thinking of how sick and twisted the whole affair was, even though it really came down to two simple things: save the girl, ruin Bekku. Kill the girl, Bekku is safe. If you had asked him to choose then, he would have chosen the girl without a moment's notice, so obsessed with his damn prediction breaking. But now... Well, who knew? All he knows and knew and most likely will ever know is that he cursed her to this broken life when he saved the girl.

Or maybe he never really had that choice.

Again, who knew?

And then he flashes back to that damn photo of the girl without a face, but whose face was beaten and cut, whose

_[How stylish!_

_What do you think, senpai?_

_Should I buy it? Hehe...]_

soft green and flowing halter top was ripped down the front, exposing the white lace bra--which, too, was ripped--and whose short black shorts had been nearly destroyed in what was either an act of frustration, lust, or brutal anger. He never found out which. Blood coated a majority of her body, but was most noticeable on her leg. Just below the inside of her right thigh. Her normally clean and creamy white skin was stained with red and dirty alley water. Her shaking hand was clutching a plastic mirror.

_Rape crime_, he had unemotionally deduced. _Not a bunny girl with that skin. Probably still a student._ The red bricks behind her he recognized, because they were the ones that led near his house--a crime that hit close to home. But when? There was no obvious clock in the snapshot, but he'd guessed around noon-time. _On a Sunday, too, with those clothes._ Wet, chestnut hair clung to her neck. _After rain? _Well, the Tokyo area was in the middle of a slight drought, so when rain finally turned up, he would know.

But who was she?

He runs a hand through his perpetually wild hair now, forcing himself to think. Finish the story. Well, he knew the ending now. And he knew it. He would never forget so long as he lived. On the spring of his twentieth birthday, Banjou Kizaki died, alright. Under the blossoming cherry blossom tree near his house. When his phone rang--one of Bekku's nameless friends.

_[Senpai! _

_Where the hell are you?_

_We've been calling your house non-stop for an hour!_

_Bekku... Bekku... she...!]_

It was then that he looked at the time. One o'clock in the afternoon.

It was Sunday.

The phone slipped from his hand. He ran.

She was in the hospital by then, and fully awake and fully aware of what had happened. They had cleaned her up, bandaged her wounds, but not her mind, not her heart. Not her soul, not what she was feeling. There was no way to cure that disease. She couldn't even smile when she saw him walk through the white doors and into the white walls of her room. She looked shocked, wounded, and ashamed.

_[Senpai...]_

He couldn't smile back. It was her eyes. They were red-rimmed and puffy--as expected, the poor girl had been crying her eyes out for an hour--but it wasn't what he saw them as, it was what he saw _in _them that caused Banjou Kizaki to fall to his knees right then and there. She was broken. Shattered into a million pieces. No more relatively carefree trips to the suburban mall, no more laughs, no more teasing. No Bekku. No more of the country girl-gone-city girl he had grown to know and love. She was there, but she wasn't there. And it broke his heart to contemplate it.

_[I'm so sorry, Bekku-san._

_Oh...god!_

_I'm sorry..._

_I'm so sorry...]_

He didn't look up, but he could feel her staring that same, not-Bekku stare at him, not wanting to cry in front of him because he was crying in front of her--fat tears falling and filling up the lenses of his shocking pink glasses. She always was too strong.

_[Senpai...]_

The air stilled, and he pulled himself to his feet then, and walked over to her hospital bed, sitting next to her pale body. Reached out an unsteady hand, not sure what to expect. Hoping she would take it, hoping he could feel her warmth and know that at least that was the same.

_[Don't touch me!]_

The change was drastic. Her nails dug a bleeding gash into his hand as she swatted it away. Her body contorted, and hunched forward. He could see her backbones and her ribs sticking out from the stark white skin through the open back of the hospital gown. The same nails that slashed his skin now dug into her own arms, clawing at them. The chestnut her--_the _chestnut hair--covered her face, but he could see her trembling, holding back. More harm than good. He turned to leave.

_[Please...! _

_Please just..._

_Just stay with me, Senpai.]_

Her voice was coarse, as if it hurt to speak--to speak to _him_--but he complied, pulling up one of those unforgiving plastic chairs and seating himself in it. He didn't try to take her hand, to touch her shoulder, to stroke her hair. But God! How he wanted to. To comfort her and to fix her and to fix _this_. To have the power to change the past instead of having wasted all his time trying to save the future. He would've died that day if she had been spared.

And it was at that moment--when that particular thought crossed the mind of Banjou Kizaki--he realized what some part of him had known all along. It wasn't just a 'tentative love' anymore.

Because Banjou Kizaki then knew that he was hopelessly and irrevocably in love with Bekku Nanaki.

And, as usual, he had realized this too late.

_[Banjou-kun?]_

He's pulled out of the story now, his mind which was so tightly wrapped around the closely knit threads now relaxes, letting her voice guide him out of the shadows and into the dawn that lay outside the window--just brushing the horizon with fingertips of rose. Slowly, he sits up in the desk six years too small and turns towards the doorway. And then, the liar smiled.

"Hi Bekku," she smiles back, her green eyes vibrant and polished like glass. Her skin is the same milky white, her brown hair still cut cruelly short, her clothes still stylish. The white mini dress flows around her lacy black leggings like water. Lace up wedge heels adorned her feet and upon her neck she bore his steel--the locket he had given her just a week ago.

"Wow... I haven't seen this place in ages!" Her movements are fluid as she walks to the blackboard, no longer the hyperactive actions of a young girl, but the mature steps of a grown woman. Her voice is softer. "Why come here, Banjo?"

"Reminiscing about the good old days," he lies, grinning. "You me, and 'Jamakita'." she laughs behind her hand.

"It feels so far away, now..." she lies, smiling.

"I hardly remember it," he lies.

"I loved you, Banjo." she says.

"I loved you, too, Becky." he says.

"I still do, Banjo." She truths.

"Me too, Becky."

And she smiles then, because she knows then that he was finally, completely, the truthfully honest.

Lying was a delicate practice after all.

But then again, Banjou never could lie to her.

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**Reviews? Reviews make me smile.**


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